Here is what I have done, and if by chance I have used some immaterial embellishment it has only been to fill a void due to defect of memory. I may have taken for fact what was no more than probability, but I have never put down as true what I knew to be false. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, 1712

EIGHT: It

Since it happened, I’ve been encased in armour. I could detonate any bomb. I could walk through fire. I could leap from forty stories and not break as much as a bone in my little finger. I feel nothing. I feel no one. Try me.

I said, I don’t believe I will trust anyone again. He said, Oh, I’ve destroyed your trust in everyone, have I? I knew from his tone he knew well what he had done but more, he resented that I had been there for him to do it.

It was not meant to happen, he later wrote, as if it was an abstract in the control of some other agency in the face of which he was entirely helpless. It was not meant by whom to happen? Who did not mean it to happen? What it, which who?

Another thing that troubles. He knew my childhood. Asked questions.

After it I wrote, Did you sense something does my past reveal itself, unknown to me, as a point of vulnerability? It can’t be a coincidence that you knew my childhood, and then it that was not meant by whom just happened.

They don’t usually take ownership of what they’ve done, said the counsellor. They usually do everything but acknowledge it.

You will trust again, she said, but you will likely be more wary.

You are angry, she said, I’m glad you’re angry.

She rings the detective. J is ready to make a statement, she tells him. It will be beneficial for her. She wants me there.

They organise a mutually convenient date. I nod my agreement.

I am angry. I am white-hot angry. This bullshit. This it wasn’t meant to happen bullshit. How does a man accidentally violate a woman? Let’s see how the smartest man in any room explains that, shall we?